


Ducking Fireballs

by TerresDeBrume



Series: AUs without a cause [3]
Category: Sliders, X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Basically, Dimension Travel, Gen, I'd be delighted, If anyone is willing to write in this Sliders verse, Prompt Fic, Science Fiction, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, World Traveling, prompt, this is a very long prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-24
Updated: 2011-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-21 17:39:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/227835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles Xavier, Physics genius, and his friend and fellow brainiac Hank McCoy just finished their world-travelling machine. It stands to reason that they'd want to show off to Raven Darkholme (Charles' best friend <i>and</i> the girl Hank hopes to date someday) and Erik Lehnsherr (Charles' enigmatic soldier-turned-physics-expert love interest).</p><p>After all, scientists are allowed their bit of Harmless fun as well, right?</p><p>Right.</p><p>That was before Charles had to duck fireballs, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ducking Fireballs

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, I've had this Idea while imagining how canon!Charles/Raven/Erik/And Co. would react to meeting the version of themselves we fanwriters create for our AUs.
> 
> Sadly, I really don't have time to write it all, so I thought, why not write the beginning, and turn it into a prompt of sorts?
> 
> So, fellow writers, here's the deal: I'd like to see what you come up with based on this starting point of mine: One Shot, Multichapters, with or without other versions of the characters, action, SF, Fantasy, with or without porn: I WANT TO READ IT.
> 
> *Pretty please with cream on top*

__

Okay, so Erik wasn’t impressed.  
Granted, Erik wasn’t impressed often, and even on the off chance that he was, he just didn’t show it –most physics profs were very impressed at Charles’ work, or at his very existence, but it seemed Erik had made a point of never being impressed at anything… or at least, not if it wasn’t metallic. Weird habits like that.  
Anyways, the point was: Erik wasn’t impressed, and despite Raven’s puzzled but obviously admiring attitude, Charles could not let it go that easily.

_“It works! It really does! We recalculated everything thrice, didn’t we Hank?”_

_Hank quietly nodded from his corner of the lab, where he was perusing over the machine’s plans one more time. Charles couldn’t really blame him: this project of theirs was completely unheard of and totally science-fiction worthy, except it was totally real and the most groovy thing ever invented._

_Think of it, he’d said to Raven when the machine had neared its completion visiting different dimensions, places where history turned out to be completely different from our own! Different cultures, different codes, different genetics!  
Oh for fuck’s sake, Charles if you love genetics so much just make it you damn field!_

_And okay, the suggestion was valid enough, but Charles could learn all he ever wanted to know on genetics by himself, but he couldn’t go very far without Hank, so he stayed in Physics and worked on the project of his life, until he was finally able to present it to his sister of heart and his best friend and favorite professor in physics. (There was also the part when said best friend was basically sex on legs, but that didn’t count. Too much.)_

_“It works, Charles repeated, and I’ll prove it.”_

 

And so here they are, standing in the middle of what should have been his and Hank’s lab but is now barely and empty broom closet –or warehouse, the bets are still on on that one- and Raven is close to rolling on the floor with laughter –Different history indeed, World War Three in a room was avoided here!- while Erik tries his best at a consoling look toward Charles –he fails, but Charles doesn’t resent him anyways.

“It worked,” he insists instead, stomping, because there’s no way his machine suppressed all his work and nothing else, and also because the controller has a damn timer and he’s not going to be taken back to his starting point without looking around in this new world, damnit!

Charles leaves Raven to roll her head off -wondering why she’s his best friend for the umpteenth time just today- and storms through the door, only to be brought short by a fireball. Charles dodges it neatly and half starts lecturing the scarily thin guy at the other end of the corridor about inappropriate indoor activities and the benefits of sports –in his case, fencing- when faced with aforementioned activities, when it hits him.

He’s just ducked a fireball.

The next part is fuzzier than he likes to admit, but then again he’s never actually fought anyone –back, his mind supplies traitorously, because he remembers very well how not peaceful it was to grow up alongside Cain Marko- outside a fencing match, and he’s never had to consider ducking fireballs before, so he thinks he can be partly forgotten for freezing in the hallway.  
He’s ready to admit standing and gaping at fireball-throwing-guy in the corridor isn’t his best idea, but then he must admit he’s gotten a bit sidetracked by the sight of a naked woman who, although pretty much scaly and blue was also unmistakably Raven. So yes, he’s gotten distracted, and now there’s a burn mark on his right temple and Raven –normal, pink, fake-blonde Raven- is shouting at his face while Hank has a major panic attack and Erik –former soldier turned physics expert Erik- peers out toward the end of the corridor and swears in all the languages he knows –that makes a lot, but Charles isn’t exactly in a position to remember how much exactly- before he comes back to their side:

“Whatever the fuck these guys do, it’s efficient… one of them just headbutted a wall down, and I’m not talking about the one that moves metal!”

Ah, yes, that one: purple cape, purple ridiculous helmet and something in his shoulder making him look like Erik fifty years from now. Charles is especially afraid of this one, and by the look in Erik’s eyes, he is right to.  
Hank is fiddling with the remote for their machine now, and Charles wants to tell him to stop, they’ve got to wait for the end of set time, remember?

Then again, he’s having a hard enough time trying not to cry out in agony –a corner of his mind even manages to marvel at the fact that he’s not more terrified than he is now- so it’s not until the tale-tell howling of unnatural wind and rustle of paper indicate the appearance of a Vortex somewhere up the corridor that he manages to push out a strangled oh God.

Then Erik has his hands pressed on his shoulders and Raven is threading her fingers through his and Hank is pushing on his back and they guide him toward the Vortex, bent in half and running like none of them bar maybe Erik’s ever run. A fireball or two land on the walls next to them –dreadfully close and ohmygod it nearly got Raven- and then someone’s shouting about humans escaping until Raven’s voice barks to tell them to stop it you bloody mongrel, stop it or I’ll break you!  
There’s a steely edge to her voice, like it’s got several core sounds instead of one, and Charles knows it has to be the blue Raven speaking. But then they reach the Vortex and for the second time today, Charles is sucked into a straw.

 

They tumble in a messy pile on the other end of the straw, Erik’s elbow digging painfully in Charles’ lower back, his own head resting more or less on Hank’s thigh while Raven, the lucky one, falls down on his hips with a muffled ‘oof!’  
When they manage to disentangle themselves after a few minutes of awkward shuffling and pulling and ow, that’s my eye, keep your foot out of it, it is painfully clear that the large, lush green field they’ve landed in is nothing like Hank and Charles’ hit-by-a-maelstrom laboratory.

“Where the fucking hell are we, Charles?” Raven demands, and Erik’s silent glare looks very much approving of the way she makes his names sound like a curse.  
“I don’t know!” He says sincerely, “The timing was wrong, we should have waited for our set time to end before we tried to open a Vortex!”  
“Are you saying this is my fault?” Hank says, more panicked than outraged.  
“I’m just saying it’s not mine,” Charles shoots back.  
“You were the one who created the machine!” Hank points out, going slightly hysterical now.  
“And you were the one who knew how it worked better than anyone else!” Charles answers, his own voice shooting up toward high notes.  
“You were supposed to deal with the controller!”  
“I kind of had to duck a bloody fireball!” Charles flails, pointing at where his hair is never going to be the same again.

Hank is about to retort, probably sending the argument even farther away on the panicked and ridiculous side of things, when Erik comes between them and subdues them with a glare that makes them duck their heads like toddlers caught awake past bedtime.

“You two had better stop arguing and start working on a way to send us back home right now or I swear there will be blood.”

He’s so fierce, even Raven looks a little sorry for them, but that quickly disappears when Charles whispers in a tiny voice:

“We have to continue hopping.”  
“Begging your pardon?” Erik says, raising the Eyebrow of Doom, the one everyone in the faculty swears must have made many an enemy confess before the beginning of the interrogation, and Charles may be the tiniest bit in love with Erik –not that he’s considering that right now, of course- but it doesn’t make him impervious to The Eyebrow, and he feels himself reddening.  
“That’s why it was so important to respect the seventy-two hours time span before activating the remote: it kept us connected to our lab. Now that the controller is disconnected, there’s no way we can predict where we’ll land next, so our best shot right now is to go on travelling from a dimension to the next and hope to land home someday.”

Strangely enough, it’s Raven who looks the palest at that statement, but then again she read all of Charles’ sci-fi book collection on world travelling from His Dark Material to Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles –even if that one isn’t really a book, but still- so she’s probably the best acquainted with the concept of parallel dimensions, Charles himself excepted.

“What?” Hank asks cautiously, “Are there many dimensions parallel to ours?”  
“If authors from our Oxford are right?” Raven asks. “The numbers of possibility are infinite.”

And of course, when she puts it like that, even Charles feels more than a little depressed, and silence falls over their little foursome as they realize they’re pretty much stuck together for the next three days, at the very least, and probably longer than that. None of them know what they’ll find next time they hop through the Vortex: a war, an apocalypse, a slaughter, a home, the lab: there’s no way of knowing.

Charles feels a bit shaky and light headed, all of a sudden, and he’s seriously hoping he’s not going to faint, because that didn’t happen to him since, like, five years ago, the first time he arrived to Oxford and he fell headfirst in Erik’s arms when they spotted rats in what would become his apartment. –granted, Cain used to love Rats, especially big, wild, biting ones, and forcing them down Charles’ shirt as the least nasty of his ‘amusements’, but Charles doesn’t intend anyone, even Raven, to know that, and so he ended up looking rather ridiculous that day- and he doesn’t miss the feeling.

He thinks it’s a bit too early to be grateful for the approach of several humanlike voices, though: for all he knows, the situation of his little group could very well be about to get worse than it already is.


End file.
